Ohio Court Admits Lie Detector Tests As Evidence 198
An anonymous reader writes "Last month, an Ohio court set a new precedent by allowing polygraph test results to be entered as evidence in a criminal trial. Do lie detectors really belong in the court room? AntiPolygraph.org critiques the polygraph evidence from the this precedential case (Ohio v. Sharma)."
Ohio, eh? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Ohio, eh? (Score:5, Funny)
Given your subject line of "Ohio, eh?" and you're moving to a different state, and that you're down to 49 possibilities, I can only conclude you're one of those that view Canada as the 51st state. Come on up, we've got plenty of room, beer, and freshly-clubbed baby seals to go around. You do like hockey, eh?
Re: (Score:2)
No, I've been to Canada several times, and while I don't consider you the "51st State" at least you are civilized, more than some places further south, believe me. I dunno about the hockey
Re: (Score:2)
Gee, I'd've thought there would be more than one set in the whole country by now.
selective outrage (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
48 possibilities, not 49? (Score:2)
Wouldn't that be 48 possibilities? 48 + Current + Ohio. Or is DC being counted?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe this [imdb.com] will change your mind.
Re: (Score:2)
Conversely, if during the course of the "setup" you become stressed or nervous or scared, you get a false "lie". Do they hook monitors up to the person asking the questions to see which questions are loaded. If you get subtle signs of sudden aggression from the questioner (that they may or may not be aware of) doesn'
Lie Dectectors will persist... (Score:5, Insightful)
Gray area between truth and lies (Score:2)
Something similar happens during long police interrogations, the person being interrogated first is subjected to stress (16 hours of interrogation), they are bullied and yelled at, that lowers their confidence level to a p
Re:Gray area between truth and lies (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
This statement presupposes that the lie detector can determine someone's belief. It cannot, at least not any better than Tarot cards or tea leaves.
No, it really doesn't. The statement doesn't actually make a conclusion or rely on any external presuppositions. The GP was just stating that by the time the police administer the lie detector, there's a good chance that the victim has already been essentially brainwashed by the police into believing he or she is guilty. No assumptions.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you know what a polygraph tests? It tests variance in body stress incurred by answering certain questions when compared to control questions (that the tester knows the answer to), BLEARGH! [wikipedia.org]
Therefore, it would make sense that the person's belief would make a difference. A polygraph does not detect lies. It detects bod
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with your post, but I think from this, you didn't get what I was saying. I was saying that it's NOT reasonable to hold the following two beliefs simultaneously:
1. A polygraph can detect my intention to lie.
2. A polygraph cannot detect my belief in what I am saying.
And that was my main argument with GP poster. He seemed to be ridiculing the other person's argument based on semantics. He said that a lie detector detects lies, a
Re: (Score:2)
"Lie" detectors are very useful tools ... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Lie detectors are bullsh*t and don't work! (Score:3, Funny)
If I can illustrate the kinds of test questions that were asked. Do you drink (yes) Bzzt, wrong answer. Are you male (yes) Bzzt, wrong answer. Is it daytime (yes) Bzzt, wrong answer.
Any technology that cannot tell if a fat male drunk is awake in the daytime ain't worth a damn!
No, I didn't get the job.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lie Dectectors will persist... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lie Dectectors will persist... (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Nice, unbiased source. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Nice, unbiased source. (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree, that considering how many minor things are consider to taint the jury, a polygraph is probably just about the worst of them. The reliability just isn't there, and even when they are accurate, they don't really give any indication of what the lie actually is.
Worse, they tend to work worse when the subject is already under stress. Overall, the technology just isn't there, and won't ever get there. If anything is more reliable, it'll be of a different form, probably something that scans the brain directly. Even that though is going to be tough.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The above statement presupposes that lie detectors work at all. This presupposition is unsupported by evidence. So the statement is akin to "mediums are not as able to recall the dead if there's a skeptic in the room."
Stress detectors, not "lie" detectors (Score:3, Insightful)
My understanding is that they are really stress detectors. The flawed assumption is that stress indicates deception.
Re: (Score:2)
So somebody who is already horribly stressed, whether because they are guilty or just because they are possibly going to be falsely imprisoned is not going to be a good candidate.
The issue with somebody that is already under stress, is that the higher the background stress level, the noisier the data and the less likely that the examiner is going to get anything
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not complaining about antipolygraph.com per se. What I was complaining about (and I suppose I should have been more clear) was that the /. editors saw fit to make their site the main citation for the posted story with no supplementary material that perhaps covered the matter from a less, um, tainted perspective.
Re: (Score:2)
You're not supposed to read TFA article anyway, much less get all huffy about little details like objective reporting and balance. This isn't Fox news. Oh, wait.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No, I do not demand equal time; that would be silly, and I agree that lately the demand for equal time for absurd positions has become irritating.
But, I would like the original story told by someone who doesn't have an obvious vested interest in one side. If the vast majority of evidence indicates that that side is correct, then I have no problem with all supplementary material coming from that source. As this purports to be a news posting site, it would be nice if the original articles were, um, news,
polygraph reliability. (Score:2)
And the one time I took one, it was inconclusive on some of the things I was telling the truth about, and it didn't take into account some things that I had forgotten, but remembered after the test.
Granted, there can be a difference in skill using one, but that's just more evidence that they are not black and white as most poeple seem to think.
Even better story (Score:3, Informative)
The guy sounds like a real straight arrow, super-patriotic American who worked with a Top Secret clearance for U.S. Army Intelligence and with the FBI on the first World Trade Center bombing, and who was particularly valuable because of his fluency in Arabic and Farsi. After doing exempliary work, he applied for a job as FBI special agent, but
Re: (Score:2)
I only knew him personally for the 2 weeks of the training but we corresponded for some time after that. He seemed like a pretty sharp guy and very dedicated to his work and languages.
I enjoyed studying with him as he really pushed
Re: (Score:2)
Here [cleveland.com] is what appears to be a slightly more reliable source. Though considering the lack of search results (the first five consisted of nothing but results from that antipolygraph.com site, the wikipedia, and /.), I'm still far from convinced of the accuracy of this story. This still could be one of those rumors that started on out a message board (in this case on a site whose sole purpose is to disparage polygraphs) and grew into a news story. Please, editors, verify that the submissions you get are not
Precedential case? (Score:2, Troll)
Weight vs admissibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Weight vs admissibility (Score:5, Insightful)
That's fantastic! That means only people who can't afford better lawyers than the schmucks on TV will be imprisoned, and who cares about them, anyway?
But, to lose the sarcasm for a moment, most defendant protections in criminal law were developed so as to defend even the indigent, since they are the most vulnerable to unfairness seeing as how their lawyers either suck or are overworked (or both). If a method of obtaining evidence is bad enough that a decently trained lawyer can demonstrate its utter ridiculousness, it does not belong in a courtroom in the first place. The competence of the defendant's lawyer should not be depended upon as the single fail-safe employed to determine whether a person should be deprived of their freedom.
Re: (Score:2)
Getting evidence admitted is one thing, but getting a jury to believe it or give it any weight or credibility is something else entirely.
You seem to forget the concept of "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". Admitting polygraph evidence for the *defense* would tend to create such doubt in the mind of jurors, regardless of how hard the prosecution tried to convince them to ignore it.
Actually, this whole case stinks. First, the judge admitted the polygraph evidence. Then, the defendant waived a jury trial. Then the judge, based in part on said polygraph evidence, found the defendant not guilty. So the judge allowed the evidence, despite i
Re: (Score:2)
That may be true, but that certainly doesn't mean that there shouldn't be stringent standards of what evidence should be admissible. How about spectral evidence [wikipedia.org], should that be admissible on the grounds that the jury wouldn't give it any crediblilty? (In some parts of the US, I personally wouldn't want to test that theory.)
Lots of potential evidence is not admissible
Re: (Score:2)
Surely you jest. A jury going against what the judge said? On what basis?
They're always called lie-detectors on TV, ergo they detect lies -- that's the end of it.
Re: (Score:2)
"Considering that they aren't allowed to take written notes, they might just forget where a piece of information came from."
Huh? I sat as a juror in a murder trial in February, and we were all given notebooks to write down anything we wanted to while we were in the jury box listening to testimony. Just like we were given copies of all the photos, the crime lab / dna results, etc. And bottles of water to bring with us into the courtroom.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Weight vs admissibility (Score:5, Informative)
I can't even imagine what would've happened if that would've been considered "evidence" admissible in court. I'd probably be in prison right now.
No (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Next question please.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Nope (Score:5, Interesting)
Accuracy as against usefulness (Score:5, Interesting)
As I understand it, the most useful (from the police's point of view) way to use of lie detectors is psychological: pretend that they're 100% accurate, get the suspect to say "I didn't do it", bluff and claim that "The Machine Knows You're Lying", and get them to give a confession that way. Of course, such a strategy will fail if the polygraph becomes so widely used that everyone becomes familiar with its limitations.
Re:Accuracy as against usefulness (Score:5, Informative)
Turns out that one can get a fairly large number of confessions that way, much like you apparently desire. The problem is, it's not all THAT uncommon for the confessions to be lies. Innocent people will lie and confess to horrible, horrible crimes. And a confession given to a jury is a really really good predictor of them finding the defendent guitly. Even if there's little to no other evidence. People tend to believe confessions, which is sort of confusing since they have to reconcile the idea that "this is a dangerous lunatic with no morals and a willingness to kill" against "this is an honest man, who will condemn himself to jail by giving a confession". Still, they manage it.
Feel free to read a bit more about the subject of false confessions here [psychologytoday.com], on some webnotes for a college class here [72.14.205.104] or even here [innocenceproject.org](this last one is perhaps more likely to cherrypick it's evidence, but what it says appears to be true).
False confessions are a rather worrying thing to me, as once a person confesses, the police have a tendency to cease looking for other potential guilty parties. While it's possible some other person will eventually be found guilty and you get released, it's not really something that The System tries for. Makes 'em look bad if they accidentally put someone in jail and gave 'em a whole bunch of publicity as a convicted rapist.
Re:Accuracy as against usefulness (Score:4, Funny)
-
Re:Accuracy as against usefulness (Score:4, Interesting)
There's plenty, plenty more examples in the history of psychological experimentation, but people can be played pretty readily. That's why psychopaths do so well, it's really not as hard as we'd like to believe to control our thoughts.
Even worse, a tinfoil hat provides little protection against this sort of thing.
As to the false confessions bit, it's my belief(can't cite good evidence for this though), that people expect to get a plea-bargain of sorts. For a judge to go light on the sentencing if they just admit that they did it rather than maintain their denial. If I give you two choices, one where the judge is going to probably lock you away for the next 20 years, and one where you can confess and only get 5-10, which are you going to choose? Keep in mind that we already have multiple eye-witnesses that place you at the scene, and DNA evidence.
Re:Accuracy as against usefulness (Score:5, Interesting)
No repeatable study or sequence of studies has demonstrated that the polygraph as deployed for interrogation, screening or any other diagnostic purpose, has 70% accuracy. Or, to be more precise, better than 30% false positive or false negative rates.
The argument is not well served by taking figures like this from the air. If you care to cite a particular study, we can debate its methodology, statistical power, and freedom from confounds such as selective sampling or lack of blinding to the "true" result.
Re: (Score:2)
The fact that an "examiner" must be present and is the one "evaluating" the result makes the whole process quite suspect. If I get an EKG, or an MRI, or some other diagnostic test, the process is usually handled by a nurse or te
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The argument is not well served by taking figures like this from the air. If you care to cite a particular study, we can debate its methodology, statistical power, and freedom from confounds such as selective sampling or lack of blinding to the "true" result.
I didn't realise there was much of an argument to be had. The 70% figure was remembered from a chapter on polygraph testing in a book I read about 5 years ago, not any particular study; if you want to read the details of particular studies, there are a few hundred out there, and Google is your friend (for example this 2003 meta-study [nap.edu]). They all seem to broadly agree that polygraph testing, whilst significantly better than chance, still isn't very good (e.g. the meta-study linked to concluded that a polyg
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The meta-study found only 57 studies that were carried out with sufficient rigor to be considered. Of those, some but not all showed that under laboratory conditions the polygraph showed better than chance results. The result specifically notes that these laboratory findings likely overestimate (i.e. ar
Re: (Score:2)
Read up on the high-pressure interrogation method konwn as the Reid Technique. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique [wikipedia.org]
According to some of the websites that discuss it, even a non-negligible percentage of people who
No, I don't believe they have a place in court (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Any test can provide false results. That's why we have the concept of reasonable doubt.
Lie detectors are very unreliable (Score:5, Informative)
Professional polygraphers will claim their test works 96% of the time. Those claims are bald-faced lies. Regardless of that we can take a look at what happens if the test really did work 96% of the time.
Some employers have been known to hire polygraphers to identify which employee may have been involved in some inside theft (or similar situation). The employer asks the polygrapher to test 50 employees. The odds that the tests will be correct with all 50 employees is 0.96^50=13%. So there is an 87% chance the test will accuse an innocent person...and that assumes the test is correct 96% of the time. What invariably happens is the polygrapher 'discovers' the culprit after the first few tests, packs up his things, and goes home. He identifies the suspect so quickly because the test is only right 65% of the time. Whether the accuracy is 65% of 96% the test will still point to a suspect even if none of the employees did anything wrong.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Please cite a reference. The statement asserts that polygraph tests have better than chance diagnostic capability and if that has been demonstrated in the literature, I would like to hear about it.
However, I'm skeptical based, if nothing else, on how the result is paraphrased. It is not hard to make a test that has 0 diagnostic capability be "accurate 65% of the time." Here are two examples:
1. I have
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
I needed the job badly and I was terrified, being only around 21 or so at the time. I never took anything and I failed miserably because when they asked if youve ever stolen anything I was so nervous about setting it off.. right.. I set it off apparently. I got fired, no recours
Re: (Score:2)
Meh, back in... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What's next handwriting analysis and phrenology? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What's next handwriting analysis and phrenology (Score:2)
Lie detectors vs functional MRI lie detectors (Score:2)
More smoke and mirrors (Score:2)
To be more precise, no study has yet demonstrated that any is more or less effective than the others.
DON'T CALL IT A LIE DETECTOR!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Next in Ohio (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Truth is a point of view. (Score:2)
And as noted - statistics works against the polygraph. There is a reason why it's not used all over the world.
Some medication may also cause an unexpected outcome - either causing the person to be more relaxed or being more tense.
Let's stick to hard evidence. If there is a lack of evidence it's better to wait - at leas
I do not see a problem in this case (Score:2)
If you read the article, that is precisely what happened here. It would bother me if the court were introducing polygraph evidence over the objection of the defense.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, except they should just leave the polygraph machine disconnected. We should just have a machine that randomly flashes lights, beeps, and plays a recording that says, "LIAR!!" really loud. That'll help convict some bastards, too.
Let the Knee Jerk responses begin... (Score:5, Informative)
I can sympathize that women are outraged by the high number of men that get off scott-free with these type of charges, but that doesn't alter the fact that it really isn't fair to convict someone on nothing more than an accusation by one person without direct supporting evidence (bruises are not direct evidence). Yes direct evidence is hard to come by in these cases, they are usually executed in private without other witnesses, but I for one would rather see 10 guilty men free than send 1 innocent man to jail.
Re:Let the Knee Jerk responses begin... (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't matter if the side offering the evidence is the defense or the prosecution - once the evidence is accepted it sets a (potentially dangerous) precedent.
Re: (Score:2)
So you would be in the it's better to possibly send an innocent man to jail than to set a dangerous precedent camp?
Nice straw man you have there.
Just incidentally, why are you so sure he's innocent? What if he's guilty, but can pass a polygraph easily?
how about we acknowledge their weaknesses like any forensic tool and decide how best to use them to improve our justice system
Their weakness is that they are unreliable. The only way to "best use them" is not at all.
Re: (Score:2)
It would be better not to accept it as evidence and judge without it.
In case you didn't read the article: Anybody charged with a crime can pay his lawyer to arrange for a lie detector test to be taken. There are two possible outcomes: He comes out guilty, or he comes out innocent. If he comes out guilty, the whole affair falls under lawyer-client privilege, and police, judge or jury n
Re: (Score:2)
If the defense does not submit the test as evidence in court, then just throw the guilty fucker in prison. That sure makes things a lot quicker and easier.
-
Re: (Score:2)
What makes you think that any of the men who get off scott-free are guilty of anything?
Re: (Score:2)
not a precedent (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
precidential? (Score:2)
See? I KNEW our Precident was a liar!
It's as accurate as 'eye' witnesses (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is, the jury are more likely to trust it than they are a non-polygraphed witness statement. It will lead to less accurate trial results.
polygraphs suck (Score:2)
Every single time I take them, they ask simple questions, like "What is your name?" or "is the sky blue?" etc, I can give straight up honest answers, and it always come up that I'm lying. I'm not a "flinchy" type, but I can't pass a polygraph for love or money. So, for me, they suck, and I don't think they should be admitted in a court as evidence.
RS